Category Archives: Movies

Trifle

Posted on by
Reply

My first stop-motion video:

Mmmm, trifle…

Update!

Because Doug demanded it, here’s the recipe.

You’ll want to do this in a trifle bowl, a tall, wide, cylindrical bowl, usually on a stand. I found mine at Wal-Mart for about $8.

Bottom layer: Take an angel food cake and tear it into bits. Put it into the trifle bowl. Cover with about one or two cans’ worth of mandarin segments. Mix up some red Jell-O (I use strawberry) and pour slowly over all. You don’t want everything to float to the top, which is what I find happens if you pour too quickly. Put in the fridge till the Jell-O sets.

Middle layer: Mix up some Bird’s custard according to the package directions for custard dessert (not custard sauce). Let it cool to about room temp (you’ll want to put plastic wrap on it so it doesn’t form a skin). Pour onto the Jell-O layer. Refrigerate till the custard is cool.

Top layer: Whipped cream. Garnish with fruit (I used left-over mandarin segments; my grandma always uses Maraschino cherries; sliced strawberries would probably be good too).

Enjoy!

Birthday Boy

Posted on by
Reply

Birthday Boy
Discovered in Patrick Johanneson‘s Flickr photostream.

Just me, wearing my new T-shirt.

My bro-in-law exposed his sons to the Original Trilogy, and ever since then they’ve been deeply into the Star Wars phenomenon.

I actually was at their place when they watched Star Wars (you know, A New Hope). I was away the next day, when they watched The Empire Strikes Back. At supper that night, the oldest boy (he’s six) was agitating to watch Return of the Jedi, so that he could see how it all played out. But it was late, so my sister made him wait till the next day. He was grumping about it a little bit, so I told him, “I had to wait three years to find out what happened.”

“Why?” he said.

“Because that’s how long it took for the next movie to come out.”

He looked at me with a little smile, and said, “Boy, I’m glad I was born in 2000.”

Yeah.

"I'm there right now"

Posted on by
Reply

Warning: Freaky spooky content ahead. Don’t click unless you like the heebie-jeebies (or the jibblies, if you’re a Strong Bad fan).

Today, on YouTube, I discovered two of the eeriest moments committed to celluloid, and they’re both from David Lynch films.

Chronologically first, here’s a snip from Lost Highway:

I have the soundtrack to this film. The song that brackets the clip is titled “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, IIRC.

Aaaaaaaaaaand after that bit of spookiness, this one should seem downright normal. From Mulholland Dr.:

The singer is named Rebekah Del Rio, and there’s quite the story behind that song and its appearance in Mulholland Dr.

These two clips have something in common: When I saw the respective films that they come from, each one was the one piece that stuck with me the most. Both had that spooky quality that just embedded them in my mind.

"Truth" in advertising

Posted on by
Reply

Last night I saw an ad for Eragon, which ran a bit like this:

“The critics are in agreement! [praise for Eragon]! [praise for Eragon]! Now playing!”

I couldn’t help but notice that they had all of two quotes praising the film, so I decided I’d do my own research. I went to that clearinghouse of critical opinion, rottentomatoes.com. Regarding Eragon: The film had a 12% rating. (Hmmm. Overnight it’s climbed to 13%.) This means that 13% of the critics weighing in on the film had a high opinion of the movie, and 87%, well, didn’t.

The critics are in agreement, but I don’t think that’s the kind of message that puts buttocks in theatre seats.

Some quick reviews

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a busy few days.

Thursday: we went to Superman Returns. The movie was okay, but I think it could have been a lot more fun. Superman was dull and flat, and Lois was just depressed. Fortunately, Lex Luthor was a show-stealer, and provided most of the laughs (though there were moments where Jimmy Olsen’s imperturbably positive worldview made me think of Will Ferrell, in a good way).

Friday: I bought Clone Wars Vol I and II and Mike Patton’s latest project, Peeping Tom.

Peeping Tom is an eclectic mix of tunes. Mike Patton (lead singer for the now-defunct Faith No More, among other things) teams up with a bunch of different people. Apparently the sound files were transferred via email between the various participants during the album’s gestation period. I enjoy the tunes; somewhere online I read that the project is “pop music as Mike Patton would like to define pop music”.

Given that Patton’s voice is one of the reasons that I liked Faith No More so much–he’s got a range from guttural, death-metal low registers, all the way up to a nasal falsetto, and he sounds particularly nasty when he’s stage-whispering–it seems natural that I would like this album. And I do.

Interesting note: One of his co-conspirators is Norah Jones. And she swears.

Peeping Tom on Conan O’Brien, performing “Mojo”, the album’s first single Taken off of YouTube due to copyright violations.

We also rented Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which was a fun, violent, swear-filled romp. It was a lot of fun to watch, sort of in the Pulp Fiction vein (in more ways than one, really).

And tonight I watched Volume II of Clone Wars (I’d already seen Volume I at my sister’s place, courtesy of my bro-in-law). Volume II was just as well-done as Volume I. Why o why couldn’t the prequel trilogy have been this good?

One of the extras on the DVD was a short film called Revenge of the Brick. It’s brilliant. Especially the orchestral bit at the end. Enjoy!

Oh, one more sort-of Star Wars related item. A cow-orker forwarded this to me, and now I’m contemplating buying the album. It’s a song called “Crazy”, by a band called Gnarls Barkley.

Movies from Last Weekend

Posted on by
Reply

I saw five movies last weekend; three were on TV as I convalesced from a stomach flu, and the other two were:

X-Men III
I don’t know X-Men canon. I don’t really care about X-Men canon. With that in mind, I enjoyed this movie. It was fast-paced, mostly, and well-acted, generally. Kelsey Grammer in particular surprised me; I quite liked his character, both the on-screen persona and Grammer’s portrayal of him.

In addition, no matter what else you like or dislike about the film or the franchise, I must say this: Magneto is one of the most complex villains I’ve ever seen on screen, in any movie, of any kind. Not a bad accomplishment for a super-hero film.

and

The Da Vinci Code
Sometimes I get the feeling that I’m a member of a super-secret society with a rather short membership list: the people who have never read Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. I tried, O how I tried, to read it; but somewhere before the hundredth page, I got fed up with the exposition, the every-chapter-has-a-cliffhanger, and the sense that the whole thing tottered on a set of, oh, nine hundred interlocking conspiracies from down through the ages, the disproof of even one of which will set the whole thing at nines, leaving a scattered mess of half-baked ideas and loopy fallacies.

The movie’s kind of the same way, only I didn’t leave at the half-hour mark. But the exposition is still a huge part of why I didn’t like the film; there was one scene in particular where Tom Hanks looks Audrey Tautou in the eye and essentially says, “Now listen closely, Audrey, because the audience needs to know this”, and then proceeds to spew forth a piece of pure info-dumperation, complete with words you won’t find outside of the Oxford dictionary. No one in the world–not even a Harvard professor of Religious Symbology–would use words like that in conversation.

So: Meh. Now at least I know how the novel ends, and all without having to, you know, read it.

Oh, the movies on TV? Chasing Amy, which I hadn’t seen since whenever it first hit VHS; Gattaca, my DVD copy that my darling wife bought for me; and one of my all-time favourite movies, definitely my favourite action movie ever, The Road Warrior.

G’night!